It is common to receive unwanted or undesired telephone calls in a residence or in a small office. These telephone calls may be from an unwanted caller or may be received at an undesired time. It may be desirable for telephone calls from an unwanted caller to be identified and blocked before the telephone calls reach a user's telephone. Alternatively, it may be desirable for such telephone calls to be identified and answered by voicemail. Similarly, it may be desirable for telephone calls received at an undesired time to be blocked before the telephone calls reach the user's telephone, and/or for such telephone calls to be identified and answered by voicemail. These telephone calls may be wrong numbers, harassing sales calls, or pranks.
It may also be desirable to receive telephone calls only in predetermined rooms of a residence or offices of a small office building at predetermined times. A conventional residential telephone system includes a network interface device (“NID”) disposed outside the residence. The NID receives telephone calls from one or more central offices via a trunk line. These central offices may include, for example, Class-1 regional central offices, Class-2 sectional central offices, Class-3 primary central offices, Class-4 toll offices, and Class-5 end offices. The NID transmits the telephone calls to one or more telephones disposed inside the residence via one or more telephone lines. It may be desirable, for example, to receive telephone calls only on a master bedroom telephone in the middle of the night, while telephone calls to a kitchen telephone and a child's bedroom telephone on the same telephone line are blocked.
Thus, what is needed is a device for a residence or a small office that functions like a key system or a public branch exchange (“PBX”) utilized in large office buildings. A conventional business telephone system includes a key system or a PBX disposed inside the large office building. The key system or the PBX receive telephone calls from the one or more central offices via the trunk line and transmit the telephone calls to one or more telephones disposed inside the large office building via one or more telephone lines. A key system allows a large number of telephones to share a relatively small number of telephone lines. For example, a typical key system may allow about 4-150 telephones to share about 2-100 telephone lines. A key system may also accommodate, for example, facsimile (“fax”) machines or personal computers (“PCs”), acting as a local-area network (“LAN”). A PBX is a transmission and information processing system that may handle about one-hundred to several thousand telephone lines, providing such functions as caller identification (“caller ID”) services, telephone call blocking services, automated attendant services, voicemail, least-cost routing, energy management services, and integrated voice and data services.
In areas where an appropriate telephone network is located, services such as caller ID, telephone call blocking, and voicemail may be purchased from a telephone services provider. For example, if a telephone is busy, or a fax machine or a PC having a telephone modem is being used, an incoming telephone call is automatically captured in the telephone network and redirected to voicemail. An incoming fax may be redirected to an email system. Such telephone networks, however, are external to the residence or small office, and are not available in all areas. Thus, what is needed is an internal automated telephone assistant device which acts as a gate that a caller must pass through before he or she may communicate with a user directly.